That’s all I remember.
Only that face, which I remember as being black. And after that day, there were two things I knew:
1. that the man I had wanted to kill was a roofer by the name of Clemens Mulder, and that he would never be my friend;
2. that I had found a new love, namely the release of alcohol, and would be true to it for the rest of my days.
It’s like a chain of little spiders,’ was India’s comment when she saw the stitches on my eyebrow.
She brought me to the garage behind the house, where Joe was jabbing at his arm with a needle.
‘Joe, what are you doing?!’ India said.
Along the length of his left forearm he had tattooed the letters of his own name: JOE — still bloody, but a clear aquamarine beneath. It was August, the dog days had us all in their grip.
‘What’s up, Frankie, been in a fight?’ Joe asked.
All you had to do was look at me: both eyes blackened with old blood, six stitches across my brow. Joe never got into fights, things like that didn’t happen to him. I realized that I’d crossed the line into the bastards’ domain, joined the ranks of the murderous and, what’s worse, of a family in which the boys started swinging their fists as soon as they came of age. (The Hermans have no girls; ours is a bloodline of gnarls and knots, not of soft things.)
I, who had vowed never to become like them, had plunged headfirst into the first brawl that came my way. If no one had stopped me I would have strangled that roofer. I had fallen, and Joe could tell. He didn’t say much that day, just sat there jabbing more ink into his arm. His jaw muscles pulsed each time the needle pierced his skin.
I left after a while and didn’t see him for a couple of weeks.
In the days that followed I worked on my diaries more than ever, going back to do some necessary checks and amendments.
My thoughts went back to the years before I’d met Joe, before I’d left the world behind for 220 days. So many questions back then. So many that it made me dizzy. There had to be more to it than this, I was sure of it: people couldn’t really be content to live and die the way they did. Some secret was being kept from me, some thing they knew but weren’t telling, something a thousand times more real than this. Wondering why, they say, is the start of all philosophy. For me it was the start of a kind of hell.
‘No whys about it,’ Pa would say. ‘That’s just the way it is.’
And when I kept asking he would smack me up against the side of the head. He was the wrong person to ask, in other words, but that didn’t mean there was no answer; I wasn’t too ignorant to know ignorance when I saw it. So I waited. Somewhere a door would open, someone would explain how it went, and until then I would keep my eyes wide open and keep asking why.
People, I knew, liked to think of life as a stairway. You started at the bottom and kept climbing as life went on. Nursery school, kindergarten and then primary school, where they told you that ‘higher education’ was the answer. That’s where you’d find out about the things you couldn’t see from here.
I believed them. But I was consumed by impatience, so I went on asking why until it started getting really irritating. In their eyes I was just being cheeky, overplaying my hand. As though I was asking to speak to God himself.
I wouldn’t want to pretend that I, with all those questions of mine, was the kind of kid you’d have found endearing. More like autistic. Back then my thinking had an aggravating severity to it that I’ve never even approached since. The same kind of barebones austerity I later came to admire in the philosophy of the samurai.
And the answer didn’t come. I’d expected a lot from high school. Biology, history, literature. . that’s where it was going to happen. It had to be buried somewhere inside that pile of books I lugged around each day.
But the books spoke with the voices of teachers, or the teachers spoke with the voices of books: how that worked was never quite clear to me. They taught me skills, but provided no answers.
Until then, my ‘why’ had always been referred on. But this, for the time being, was where the buck stopped, this was where I was going to stay for the next five years; these same mouths would speak to me the whole time and, to my horror and dismay, I discovered that my question wasn’t particularly popular here either. Things were what they were, and it didn’t do to go poking around in it too much — just like Pa said.
I caught a glimmer of an abysmal truth. The people here wanted to pass the time as comfortably as possible, without having to deal with questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘I don’t know’. No one around me was doing anything except the best imitation they could of what they’d seen other people do before. Parents imitated their parents, kindergarten teachers other kindergarten teachers, pupils other pupils, and clergymen and educators each other and their books. The only variation was in what they forgot to imitate.
None of them knew the way, rank amateurism was all it was. And I lay awake at night, my eyes wide open, more afraid of the things that weren’t there than of the things that were.
Some people say they were born in the wrong body; I, however, was born not only in the wrong body but also in the wrong family in the wrong village in the wrong country and so on. I read a lot, and in those books I thought I sometimes perceived a shimmer of light. I devoured every book in the Lomark library, except for the large-print section. When I discovered the samurai, I was impressed by their Spartan self-discipline. They at least saw the need, when you had lost your honour and life was rendered meaningless, to stick a knife in your own belly. Seppuku: the clean, straight cut you could never practice, because the first time was also the last. More people should give it a go.
At church I sat in the back pew playing cards, while up in front Nieuwenhuis was saying ‘He that searches for the truth comes to the light,’ but I still couldn’t see a thing.
Nieuwenhuis’s conviction was born of the need to be convinced, that much was clear to me. But exactly what he was convinced of was less clear. Repression was the only thing that could have kept that trap spring-loaded for two thousand years. But now that the internal combustion engine and social democracy had taken some of the tension out of it, you saw repression making way for tolerance and guitars in the church. It was like the way old people who had been real bastards all their life would suddenly break down and weep over nothing when their number was almost up.
Looking back on it, I think I wasn’t even searching for the truth or anything, just for something that shed a little light.
My first year of high school was one huge disaster. It made me sick. Everywhere I looked I saw mediocrity and submissiveness. And an innocence that ruined everything, because it meant no one could really help it. If we were, in fact, the measure of all things, what hope was there of redemption?
By the end of my second year I was furious. A long vacation followed, and I watched July go by. Then August came, and I waited for nothing. I lay on my back in the tall grass that was already turning yellow. The dryness rustled, little bugs crawled over my arms and legs. I let them. Somewhere I heard the pounding of a galloping horse, the corn was still half high and the rust-brown sorrel stuck out above it. I looked up at the blank sky. A lovely blue and all, but otherwise nothing. Growling monotonously, a little plane crossed the void.
At the edges of my vision the woolly thistles were bursting their buds, butterflies fluttered aimlessly and I had the feeling I was sinking. I sank to a dark and quiet place.